Every successful startup is in some sense a confidence game. Any founder who told the literal truth about the frenzied ad-hockery of launching a company would scare away customers and investors and quickly be out of business.

Y Combinator is one of the best-known startup incubators in Silicon Valley. Since its launch in 2005, it has helped launch hundreds of startups, including Reddit, Scribd, Airbnb and Dropbox. Participating startups come from all over the world to spen...

Name: Lollipuff One-Liner Pitch: Buy deeply discounted, pre-owned designer products that are guaranteed to be authentic. Why It's Taking Off: Most of us were once ripped off by someone selling something on the Internet that didn't turn out to be quit...

A startup accelerator is built to foster rapid growth of its portfolio companies. It's a man-made perfect storm of mentorship, access to technology, office space and an innovative community, packed into a short time frame. Essentially, the function o...

Startup incubator Y Combinator has funded more than 500 startups, including big names such as Reddit, Socialcam, and Airbnb. The incubator brings in a new class of startups twice a year. Those startups relocate to Silicon Valley for three months, get...

Jesse Draper is creator and host of The Valley Girl Show, through which she's become a spokesperson for startups and helped pioneer the way of new media content distribution. Formerly a Nickelodeon star, Draper is now CEO of Valley Girl‚ where she ov...

Mashable’s new video series, Behind the Launch, follows Vungle on its startup journey toward a launch later this month. Each week on Mashable, the Vungle team offers our readers some tips and lessons learned from their own startup experience. This we...

"Hey Doc -- Is this covered by my insurance?" The answer to this question is now readily found on iOS devices using the latest version of drchrono and its Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform for healthcare professionals. On Thursday, startup drch...

"Email is an overburdened communication channel," says Ash Rust, cofounder of startup SendHub. SendHub solves the problem of sending mass messages to people and ensuring those messages are read. Currently, SMS on cellphones can be restricting -- limi...

DebtEye announced Wednesday it is now SpringCoin, a learning-focused financial planning website that gets more intuitive as you use it. John Sun, CEO of San Francisco-based SpringCoin, started the business under the name DebtEye in February 2011. It ...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Verbling Quick Pitch: Verbling is a web...

Since Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinsky left Columbia University to join Y Combinator, their startup, Codecademy, has attracted close to 1 million users and $2.5 million in funding from elite tech investors like Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures, Ron Con...

Vimessa, a Y Combinator-funded startup, has launched a straightforward video messaging platform for mobile. The app, now available in the Apple App Store, lets users record videos of any length, save them and send them to friends and family. It works...

Could selling the mouse or iPhone you no longer need be as simple as snapping a photo with your mobile phone? Yes, says SimplyListed, makers of an iPhone application targeted at the population of the world too intimated by Craigslist or eBay to sell ...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Tagstand Quick Pitch: Tagstand is an NF...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Can't Wait! Quick Pitch: Can't Wait pus...

Sixty-three fledgling startups demoed their big ideas in front of investors and members of the press at Y Combinator's Demo Day on Tuesday. Of the massive batch -- Y Combinator's largest to date -- 32 companies now have products in the wild. With so ...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Aisle50 Quick Pitch: Aisle50 brings gro...

In the competitive daily deals space, San Francisco-based Munch On Me is adding a twist to the old group-buying model. Its hope: that it can deliver repeat customers to restaurants that daily deals giants like Groupon can't. At its core, Munch on Me ...

Airbnb, the self-described "marketplace for spaces," has issued an unconditional apology for how it treated one of its users after her place was ransacked by thieves. In addition to the apology, Airbnb has launched a new Trust & Safety Center and iss...

Jonathan Deutsch and Ryan Nielsen left Apple late last year to join Y Combinator's accelerator program and help designers build animations in HTML5 as opposed to Flash. Friday, the two-man team is releasing Hype, the first product of their startup Tu...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: WhereBerry Quick Pitch: Whereberry help...

Real-time apps are the future of the web, and new platforms for supporting that kind of technology are sprouting up everywhere. One such promising technology is NowJS, an out-of-the-box architecture for real-time web apps. NowJS uses the ever-so-tren...

Welcome to the latest edition of “Top Funding Stories,” a weekly series where we summarize the big startup funding and investment stories of the week. Here's what caught our attention this week: Peel Raises $16.7 Million Peel is an iOS app for findin...

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